Activators: Classroom Strategies for Engaging Middle and High School Students

Activators: Classroom Strategies for Engaging Middle and High School Students is a key resource for content area teachers in grades 6-12. This unique resource is a deep dive into Activators, a core teaching practice that incorporates individual think time with purposeful social interaction to increase emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement in learning. Featuring concrete, hands-on activities that can be completed efficiently at the start of a unit, lesson, or topic, Activators help to increase engagement in learning, support a well-paced lesson, generate connections to prior knowledge, provide students with opportunities to practice skills and deepen understandings, and support formative assessment. Although Activators have different formats, they all share two key components: individual think time and purposeful social interaction, which support students to develop quality responses to content and ideas while engaging with peers.

Authors Nicole Frazier and Donna Mehle offer detailed facilitation tips for more than 20 Activators, providing a clear understanding of what they are and how they work in specific settings. Frazier and Mehle created Activators with careful attention to the latest research on the most effective ways to foster engagement among adolescent learners. They were motivated to write Activators to share this powerful core practice more widely. They note, "In our 25+ combined years of teaching experience as well as our work as educational consultants who support middle and secondary teachers around the country, we've witnessed up close the ways in which these Activator formats ignite students attention and interest, maximize participation and drive well-paced lessons that deepen learning in meaningful ways."

Content area examples for English-Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, and World Languages accompany each Activator. The ELA and Math content examples are aligned to Common Core Content Standards for grades 6-12. Activators is an essential resource for educators who are committed to harnessing the power of engagement in the service of student learning.

Nicole Frazier joined ESR as a program consultant and author in 2009. Nicole supports middle and high schools in the areas of data-driven decision making, advisory, and intervention programs, and she helps leadership teams and faculty develop schoolwide systems and practices that support teaching and learning to build an intentional academic culture. In addition to serving as a high school educator for 13 years in diverse high schools, she has worked with at-risk youth in urban areas, rural schools, English language learners, high-performing large comprehensive high schools, and small turnaround schools. Nicole is the co-producer, director, and co-author of Getting Advisory Right: Tools for Supporting Effective Advisories, a four-disc DVD set released by ESR in 2011. Nicole lives with her family in Denver, Colorado.

Donna Mehle joined ESR in 2008 as a program consultant and author after more than 15 years teaching, mostly in New York City public high schools. In addition to her work in the classroom, Donna served as a literacy coach, advisory program coordinator, school leadership team member, New York City Writing Project seminar coordinator and English Department facilitator. As an ESR consultant, Donna supports districts, schools and teachers around the country with student-centered teaching and learning, advisory program design and development, and classroom management and discipline. Donna lives with her husband in Morrisville, Pennsylvania.